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Ray Anderson: Late fall ASU football season possible

Six weeks after the shutdown of college athletics for the remainder of the 2019-20 school year, Arizona State remains in a holding pattern due to the coronavirus pandemic like other Pac-12 and Power 5 conference schools.

ASU Vice President for Athletics Ray Anderson said Friday that his senior staff, internally and via larger working groups, are "planning for a variety of contingencies. We're trying to anticipate, but it's throwing darts out there and we don't know where they're landing. We feel compelled to look at various scenarios so we're not starting from scratch if in fact the skies clear and hopefully we have a model that's somewhat relevant."

ASU has yet to announce when it will resume holding classes on campus, a necessary step before any athletic competition can resume. So fall sports including football, the main funding source for ASU's 24 sports, remain in limbo.

No in-person organized team activities are allowed at Pac-12 schools through May 31. But the NCAA now is allowing all Division I teams to have up to eight hours per week of virtual non-physical activities such as film review and team meetings.

Anderson believes sliding a football season into the late fall or beyond is possible and perhaps essential.

"Would you get a whole 12 games in, who knows?" he said. "Could you figure out a nine-game conference schedule, perhaps. I know there's enough incentive to get football in if you could do it safely because it's financially so critically important."

Football accounted for $50 million of ASU's $121 million athletic department revenues in the 2018-19 fiscal year. The next largest revenue sources were $13 million in direct institutional support (for scholarships), $10 million in student fees and $10 million from men's basketball.

Men's basketball revenue for 2019-20 already has taken a hit from the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament. In late March, the NCAA announced its revenue distribution to Division I schools in June will be $225 million, down from a budgeted $600 million.

Anderson said ASU could find a way to stage a delayed football season, overlapping more with basketball and other sports, if necessary.

"We would have no choice if we want to make sure our whole athletic department survives in a holistic sense, which we are bound and determined to figure out if it's humanly possible," Anderson said.

ASU has not yet announced university-wide furloughs or staff reductions, but Anderson said he is not naive to the idea that such moves could become necessary. The University of Arizona recently announced furloughs and Louisville athletics is using furloughs and layoffs to cover a projected $15-million budget deficit.

"We're committed to try to avoid that, but reality is reality," Anderson said. "We'll be led in that exercise by what the president (Michael Crow) and the institution as a whole determines is appropriate. We've not been asked to consider that up to this point, and we've got our fingers crossed we can navigate and figure it out. But that's to be determined."

Reach the reporter at jeff.metcalfe@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8053. Follow him on Twitter @jeffmetcalfe.